Crowstep
15d ago
Disappointed that Faceh's comment got so many nominations and upvotes, given that his comment was a trivially dispprovable claim (discussions of birth rates focus mostly on men) and his 'evidence' was three articles he didn't like combined with a nonsequitous call to action (find me a pronatal policy that tries to limit women's behaviour, when there are literally no pronatal policies that limit men's behaviour). For an apparently 'quality contribution', there's no actual contribution there, no argument beyond the impulse to blame women.
comes out of thin air
Are you forgetting the part where the Spanish government granted a mass amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants a few weeks ago?
Or perhaps the decision by the Spanish supreme court that forbade the authorities in Ceuta from turning away illegal immigrants?
But no, it must somehow be the fault of the Jews.
Crowstep
20d ago
I wouldn't call out someone, maybe they're autistic, but would (subconsciously) pay more attention to other signs they think like that.
Funnily enough, both my wife and my mother have used female in this context. I had to explain to both of them that it sounded weird. Bless their hearts for not being up to date on what they're supposed to be offended by.
Crowstep
23d ago
Am I missing something. Like 90% of the comments seem to be straightforwardly answering the question. There is one top level comment about the sleeve, and I don't know enough about drums to know whether or not that's a big deal. But it seems disproportionate to condemn Reddit as a platform with this as an example.
Crowstep
23d ago
Is it because modern oligarchs are not valuing art for its own sake, and not interested to pour cash to enterprises that will never pay for themselves, or just lack of imagination?
I suspect it's a personality difference between landed gentry and ultra-PMCs. There are definitely passion project films, but they are usually funded by filmmakers, rather than billionaires who have hired filmmakers.
Crowstep
23d ago
the controversy was the whole point.
Maybe you're right, or maybe the point was making the film eligible for Best Picture.
A real baller move would have been to make the biggest film of the year and then watch everyone's confusion when they realise it isn't eligible.
Crowstep
23d ago
Strictly looking at human sexual preferences, this kind of relationship isn't even that unusual except for the fact that it's probibited by society (for good reason).
I half of Europe, 14 or 15 is the age of consent. In the rest it's 16. You'd think from the headline he's been grooming an 11 year old.
Crowstep
24d ago
There is a very simple solution - decrease the extra care elderly people receive.
I'm not sure it would work like that. We've seen with the pension age debates that young people are perfectly willing to defend more goodies for the old, because young people will be old one day too.
The relative weakness of the youth vote vs the grey vote in the UK is why the government is raising the retirement age but not removing the triple lock, which is mathematically unsustainable.
I suspect we'll see more countries go that route. Maintain generous pensions but with higher pension ages, which to be fair was the initial idea for pensions. 20th century politicians didn't imagine people living 30+ years in retirement.
Crowstep
24d ago
Immigration isn't going to be a viable solution for much longer
I saw on twitter someone describe immigration as a solution to declining birth rates as being like trying to turn a shredder into a printer by shoving in more paper.
Crowstep
24d ago
Global birth rates were declining in the 2000s, certainly (which is what your first chart shows). But if you narrow it down to the richest countries at the time, most were seeing mini-baby booms. The US, UK, Japan, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the Scandinavian countries, China, Canada and Russia (plus a bunch more) all saw TFRs increase between 2000 and 2010.
These researchers estimate that the introduction of the iPhone specifically reduced TFR in the USA by 33-52%.
'Modernity' doesn't really fit as an explanation. After all, the 1950-70s were definitely more 'modern' than the 1930-40s, but that's when the Baby Boom happened. The Industrial Revolution (arguably the beginning of 'modernity') caused the global population to explode as it left behind the malthusian limits of agriculture.
Of course, perhaps framing it as 'narcissistic culture vs smartphones' is the wrong way to go about this. Lyman Stone makes a convincing case in the second half of this article that the kind of self-centred culture you criticise was created by the technology shock of digital entertainment (of which smartphones seem the most powerful part).
To that end, we should not see the “long decline” graph as a rebuttal to cell phones, nor should we see digital technology as a mere “accelerator of the trend.” The new selfishness is only a viable ideology because digital technologies made it viable. Sitting at home wouldn’t be appealing without the digital technologies! These norms would not have reached scale without the specific vehicles to propel them, and because socializing is a cooperation problem, even individuals who do not share emergent selfishness norms lose out on potential socializees. People don’t RSVP to the party because they are at home chatting to their AI girlfriend. Even people trying to live in the real world are impacted.
Crowstep
24d ago
The root problem is that the beliefs and values of modern (ie post-modern) liberalism are not conducive to, and in some respects actively incompatible with, forming healthy and stable relationships.
Before 2010, birth rates were going up across the developed world, and either reached or came close to reaching replacement level.
We'll never know, but it may well be the case that modernity minus the smartphones, social media and dating apps could have been fine. This paper suggests that it is specifically short form video and dating apps that are the problem, but not video or social media in general (Facebook and Youtube don't seem to have affected birth rates, while Tinder, Tiktok and Instagram did).
Crowstep
29d ago
I think it's worth pointing out that under your definition, Lebanon is an apartheid state; Syria is an apartheid state; Egypt is an apartheid state; heck, even Norway is an apartheid state.
I'm not VIM but what exactly do you mean by that? Because Norway etc has non-citizens in its territory?
Me and my wife were in a similar situation, with a flat in the city and planning to have our first child. The financially responsible thing would have been to have baby #1 in the city, and then moved out to the suburbs when #2 came along.
In the end, we moved out to the suburbs first. It wasn't the most economical decision, but I'm glad we made it. It's very comforting to be able to say 'this is our house, we own it, and we're probably going to live here forever'. Moving was stressful enough with my wife being pregnant at the time, it would have been harder if we'd had a baby or toddler I think.
But it really depends on how much you like the condo. If you weren't living there and were just viewing it as a potential buyer, is it the one you would go for?
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